The World Congress of Applied Linguistics will be held July 24 to 29, 2005 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. This conference is the major scholarly meeting of applied linguists internationally, attracting leading scholars, researchers, and advanced students of applied linguistics from around the world. Known informally as AILA 2005, this conference is the 14th tri-annual meeting of AILA (I'association internationale de linguistique appliquee / International Association for Applied Linguistics). AILA is an international federation of 37 national or regional associations of applied linguistics, and the only truly international scholarly organization in this field. The objectives of AILA are to promote research and teaching in all fields of applied linguistics, to disseminate the results of this research, and to promote international and interdisciplinary cooperation in these fields. The discipline of Applied Linguistics involves principled approaches to language-related concerns, including language education, acquisition and loss, bilingualism, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, literacy, rhetoric and stylistics, language for special purposes, psycholinguistics, second and foreign language pedagogy, language assessment, and language policy and planning. The conference proceedings will be published in a variety of scholarly media.